Saturday, October 8, 2011

October is shaping up to be another busy month for me; fortunately, it's also looking to be a productive one. I make no promises about anything (except Thousand Suns, since it's being laid out right now), but it looks like a number of long-delayed projects are breaking free from the logjam and that makes me very happy indeed. With luck, it'll be an emotion shared by others. More details on this soon.

13 comments:

Dietrick! Cool. Why not indeed. Loved the stuff he did for GDW and FASA back in the day. Very iconic style. It always reminds me of some of the the marker rendering styles in the early Star Wars concept art books too.

It's a ship? It looks like a gun. I mean, it's neat, but it looks like a gun.

I thought that was a rather obvious feature myself. Of course I just saw Aliens again today and have to admit the Sulacco looks like a giant combat shotgun to me as well even without the inclusion of the muzzle design(s) of the illustration above. Maybe it's just I see guns in silhouettes like that (long bit 'barrel' + perpendicular jutting 'grip' & stubby 'stock' = gun) and figure the designer does too.

To me it suggests some sort of spinal mount, which I would think was a nod to Traveller while evoking a retro low tech form follows function 'hard sci' feel.

Ship looks good. He got the solar sail, sort of. I am guessing that the nose is pointing upwards. What he missed is the propulsion part. I am guessing that the ship uses a version of the photon rocket propulsion, that would require a fission reactor, helium fuel, a version of a particle accelerator/gun to shoot the fuel, magnetic coils to control the fission/anti matter explosion in the propulsion par of the ship, its burner, which would be protected by an giant parabolic reflector screen, that would protect the ship from the heat and destructiveness of the controlled fission reaction. Taken together you would have a space vessel that would have constant acceleration to give constant consinuous acceleration to bring it to relativistic speeds.

Combat oriented space opera genre seems to eschew this realistic terrestrial technology (and trhe bulky appearance) in favor of the mything warp drives/jump speeds/UFO anti-gravity magic, which allows open/diffuse designs for spacecradft (that couldn't withstand even the acceleration forces that were routinely endured by the airframes of the flying fortresses (30,000+ PSI on the wing root, when the plane is pulling out of the dive to avoid the flak) and for spectacular space battles, reminiscent of the terrestrial navies, while the realistic space ship will go out in a cloud of dust (a la Star Wars) if the reflector shield developsa a tiniest crack one molecule wide. Any kinetic particle inpact on the ship would generate it, so any single hit on the ship would be the end for that vessel. I think that George Lucas got that part right.

@Bear: The black part at the top is obviously thepropulsion, since it ends in a classic "Saturn V" cup-shaped nozzle is surrounded by mysterious "accelerator rings" and is shielded from the main ship by a giant plate. That would make the protruding bit at the bottom left a really big (compared to the overall size of the ship) weapon.

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